All posts for the month August, 2013

I’m still thinking about the dependency-injection and Akka stuff and will have at least one more longish post on the subject, but I’ve recently become distracted by refactoring some of my old JavaScript code into ClojureScript and figuring out Clojure’s new core.async library (ultimately I hope to form all of these distractions into a ring instead of a straight line, at which time I will be the acme of productivity, but that’s another story). But before I get too deep into Clojure land I wanted to plug a few Scala-related things I’ve come across recently.

Firstly, Derek Wyatt’s book Akka Concurrency: Building reliable software in a multi-core world is excellent, covering a great many Akka topics in an enjoyable style. In particular, his chapter on testing seems profoundly relevant to the mock injection topics I’ve been thinking about, but I haven’t quite absorbed it yet. The whole thing is refreshingly up to date, too (which makes sense since it was only published a month or two ago), and it doesn’t pad out its length with a lot of “learn Scala in 30 days” remedial material. Anyways, I recommend it thoroughly.

Secondly, John Sullivan’s long post about the cake pattern is by far the best treatment I’ve seen of it online, and is required reading for anyone interested in dependency injection in Scala. (It’s been up for several months now but somehow I missed it until recently.) John has written a dependency-injection framework, congeal, which makes instant intuitive sense for me as someone coming from a Java / Spring background; unfortunately it depends on some macro stuff which won’t make it into Scala’s mainline, so it isn’t ready for prime time and will need to be rewritten down the road once Scala’s macros reach their next stable state. There’s a video from ScalaDays 2013 describing the framework.

And finally, following up on the subject of the cake pattern, Daniel Spiewak’s keynote from NEScala, “The Bakery from the Black Lagoon,” is an excellent talk which made me think about the cake pattern in a new way (as more of a compiler-enforced module system than as a form of dependency injection). His implementation of the cake pattern is also interestingly different from most examples I’ve seen online – in particular, he mostly eschews self-types, with the exception of needing one for a virtual class.

Just as a quick follow-up to my previous post, I thought I’d note that the official Akka blog has published a post regarding Akka and dependency injection (kind of weirdly expressed as a mini white paper, as though the internet at large had issued an RFP for an actor-based concurrency system with dependency injection).

While, as I mentioned before, I should emphasize that I’m by no means an expert in Akka or actor best practices, I’m not convinced that this document addresses my particular concerns with the intersection of Akka and dependency injection. I’m still thinking about a larger post breaking down the approaches to this topic that I’ve seen online, but this one sort of falls into the “mock stuff outside of Akka” camp.

The document has two main points: firstly, if you have an existing dependency-injected service, you can pass along a factory which knows where to find it to the Props constructor of an actor, and there’s a way to attach a DI application context to an ActorSystem to support this, in what seems like a pretty convenient way. Secondly, if you need to expose an interface from actors to an existing system based on a DI framework, you can include an ActorSystem singleton in your DI object graph, and then expose a sort of regular-object facade over it which finds specific actors and returns either ActorRefs or futures resulting from sending ask messages to them.

That’s all well and good, but it seems more like a way to integrate between Akka and an existing synchronous DI-based system than anything that makes dependency injection useful or usable inside a purely Akka-based system. (In particular, the document’s unfortunate final section seems to be aimed squarely at recalcitrant middle managers who need to be convinced that a move to Akka will not result in a whole bunch of now-legacy code needing to be tossed out.) While I’m not incredibly interested in this topic myself, I thought Akka already had a talking point for this integration problem in the form of “typed actors“.

The bit that I still haven’t seen addressed is that if Akka likes actors to explicitly manage the lifecycles of other actors they supervise, there doesn’t seem to be any room for the inversion of control that is the hallmark of dependency injection frameworks in the first place. To put it in more concrete terms, if I’m running a partial integration test of my simple notification service and I want it to have a real database actor and mock REST web service actors, how can I tell the actor that supervises all the HTTP worker actors to create mock actors instead of live ones?

I have a half-formed idea of how this could work that involves having a sort of service locator / factory actor which is responsible for actor instantiation, but the idea in my head doesn’t particularly jibe with Akka’s supervision hierarchy, which as far as I can tell is coupled very tightly to actor instantiation.